RCN-UBE: Development of an Inclusive Community for the Instruction of Visualizing Biomolecules

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Today's biochemistry and life sciences students need an understanding of molecular structure if they are to make the critical advances in areas such as personalized medicine, agriculture, and biofuels necessary for the future welfare of humanity. Given the importance of molecular structures, images of biomolecules are extensively used in biochemistry and molecular biology textbooks and classrooms. However, these figures are usually static and do not fully convey complex structure/function relationships that happen in three dimensions, especially to novice undergraduate learners. Furthermore, instructors seldom explore whether students can extract key structural features and relationships from them. This project will develop strategies and assessments for evaluating students' biomolecular visual literacy skills by creating a network of biochemistry and molecular biology instructors. Working in teams, these instructors will develop assessments with improved accessibility for colorblind individuals that probe students' visualization skills. Following a peer-review process, a subset of these tools will be made freely available on an online repository. By working as a trans-institutional community of practice, the network of instructors will facilitate more robust and more universally understood instruction in the visualization of biomolecules. This project will use the previously developed molecular visualization framework at BioMolViz.org. The BioMolViz framework defines twelve overarching themes in visual literacy that are subdivided into learning goals and objectives. To further populate it, assessment instruments will be created to evaluate student progress in achieving the visual literacy learning objectives in the four overarching themes identified by educators in our previous work as being of greatest importance to the community--monomer recognition, alternate rendering, molecular interactions, and structure-function relationships. Following creation and peer review, iteratively revised questions will be piloted in classrooms of network members. Item-response theory will be applied using the Rasch Model to further test the instruments for reliability to determine which items should be included in the online repository. The data collected from these studies will be used to improve the methods for future assessment development and establish a community of practice for the explicit instruction of molecular visualization skills. Co-funding for this project is being provided by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE: EHR) program in recognition of the project's alignment with the overarching goals of the IUSE: EHR program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.